[11] The Roman Senate
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was once for many days debating in strict privacy a certain secret policy; and since the matter gave rise to much uncertainty and suspicion, a woman prudent in other respects, but yet a woman, kept pestering her husband and persistently begging to learn the secret. She vowed with imprecations upon herself that she would keep silent, and wept and moaned because she was not trusted. And the Roman, wishing to bring home her folly by proof, said,
Wife, you have won; listen to a terrible and portentous matter. We have been informed by the priests that a lark has been seen flying about with a golden helmet and a spear; we are therefore examining the portent whether it be good or bad, and are in constant consultation with the augurs. But do you hold your tongue. So saying he went off to the Forum. But his wife at once seized the first maid to come into the room and beat her own breast and tore her hair.
Alas, she cried,
for my husband and my country! What will become of us? wishing, and in fact instructing, the maid to ask,
Why, what has happened? So when the maid asked the question, she told the tale and added that refrain common to every babbler,
Keep this quiet and tell it to no one! The little maid had scarcely left her when she herself tells the tale to that fellow servant who, she saw,had least to do; and this servant, in turn, told it to her lover who was paying a visit. WTith such speed was the story rolled out
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into the Forum that it preceded its inventor: he was met by an acquaintance who said,
Have you just now come down to the Forum from home?
This very moment, said he.
Then you have heard nothing?
Why, is there any news?
A lark has been seen flying about with a gold helmet and a spear and the magistrates are going to convene the senate about the matter. And the husband laughed and said,
All praise to your speed, my wife! The story has even reached the Forum before me! So he interviewed the magistrates and relieved them of their anxiety; but, by way of punishing his wife, as soon as he entered home, he said,
Wife, you have ruined me! The secret has been discovered to have been made public from my house; consequently I am to be exiled from my native land because you lack self-control. When she denied it and said,
What, didn’t you hear it in company with three hundred others?
Three hundred, nonsense! said he.
You made such a fuss that I had to invent the whole story to try you out. Thus this man made trial of his wife cautiously and in complete safety, pouring, as it were into a leaky vessel, not wine or oil, but water.
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But Fuivius,
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the friend of Caesar Augustus, heard the emperor, now an old man, lamenting the desolation of his house: two of his grandsons
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were dead, and Postumius,
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the only one surviving, was in exile because of some false accusation, and thus he was forced to import his wife’s son
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into the imperial succession; yet he pitied his grandson and was planning to recall him from abroad. Fulvius divulged what he had heard to his own wife, and she to Livia; and Livia bitterly rebuked Caesar: if he had formed this design long ago, why did he not send for his grandson, instead of making her an object of enmity and strife to the successor to the empire. Accordingly, when Fulvius came to him in the morning, as was his custom, and said,
Hail, Caesar, Caesar replied,
Farewell, Fulvius.
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And Fulvius took his meaning and went away; going home at once, he sent for his wife,
Caesar has found out, he said,
that I have not kept his secret, and therefore I intend to kill myself.
It is right that you should, said his wife,
since, after living with me for so long a time, you have not learned to guard against my incontinent tongue. But let me die first. And, taking the sword, she dispatched herself before her husband.
De Garrulitate. Plutarch. William Clark Helmbold (Translator). Cambridge, MA. 1939.
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